tainties of an
adventure into the sea of foreign politics.

What as a matter of simple fact is the real nature of trade between
nations? If we are to have any clear notion at all as to just what truth
there is in the notion of the necessary commercial rivalry of States, we
must have some fairly clear notion of how the commercial relationship of
nations works. And that can best be illustrated by a supposititious
example. At the present time we are talking, for instance, of
"capturing" German or British or French trade.

Now, when we talk thus of "German" trade in the international field,
what do we mean? Here is the ironmaster in Essen making locomotives for
a light railway in an Argentine province, (the capital for which has
been subscribed in Paris)--which has become necessary because of the
export of wool to Bradford, where the trade has developed owing to sales
in the United States, due to high prices produced by the destruction of
sheep runs, owing to the agricultural development of the West.

But for the money found in Paris, (due, perhaps, to good crops in wine
and olives, sold mainly in London and New York,) and the wool needed by
the Bradford manufacturer, (who has found a market for blankets among
miners in Montana, who are smelting copper for a cable to China, which
is needed because the encouragement given to education by the Chinese
Republic has caused Chinese newspapers to print cable news from
Europe)--but for such factors as these, and a whole chain of equally
interdependent ones throughout the world, the ironmaster in Essen would
not have been able to sell his locomotives.

How, therefore, can you describe it as part of the trade of "Germany"
which is in competition with the trade of "Britain" or "France" or
"America"? But for the British, French, and American trade, it could not
have existed at all. You may say that if the Essen ironmaster could have
been prevented from selling his locomotives the order would have gone to
an American one.

[Illustration: H.M. PETER I

King of Servia]

[Illustration: WALTER H. PAGE

American Ambassador to Great Britain

_(Photo from Paul Thompson)_]

But this community of German workmen, called into existence by the
Argentina trade, maintains by its consumption of coffee a plantation in
Brazil, which buys its machinery in Chicago. The destruction,
therefore, of the Essen trade, while it might have given business to the
American locomotive maker, would have t